The lecture was about mercy. “One day the Prophet was crying so Allah sent Gabriel to ask him, oh Prophet of Allah, why are you crying? The Prophet said Ummati, ummati, my people, my people, I want Allah to save my people.”
Ouarzazi fought back tears as he related what God had commanded the archangel: “Go and tell him we shall please him and please his people!”
The eyes of the young people in the audience, however, were dry. They had, after all, grown up in Norway, where public displays of emotion were not commonplace.
The speaker lowered his head, concentrating as he approached the high point: Muhammad on his deathbed, accompanied by his wife Aisha. “Now the Prophet is sixty-three years old. Gray hair.” His voice failed him again.
He concluded with a declaration of love to Muhammad and asked if the young people in the audience loved the Prophet as much as he did.
“Do you love him? Do you really? How much do you love him? How much are you willing to sacrifice for him?” he called out.
Ayan took photographs of the weeping preacher and posted them on Twitter. He had dried up and wrote a terse reply saying they were kind of blurry.
* * *
A group of men turned up toward the end of the three-day conference. They were dressed in traditional Salafi garb: short, wide trousers ending just above their ankles, and qamis—tunics—as the Prophet was said to have worn. They sported beards but no mustaches, because the Prophet had said that no hair must touch the mouth. Some of them wore keffiyehs—Arabic scarves worn around the neck and head.
The men had checkered pasts. A number had been in gangs and some had criminal records, while others had grown up under the supervision of Child Welfare Services.
One of them was Hisham Hussain Ahmed, who had attended Dønski a few years before Ayan. Together they had manned Islam Net’s dawa stand on Karl Johans Gate, the main street in Oslo, where Ayan had approached nonbelievers and Muslims of varying degrees of faith according to the instruction sheet they had been issued. Smiling broadly in the pedestrian area, she had tried to give people a taste of Islam, while Hisham had stood watching for the most part, lacking the courage to engage with people directly, content to merely hand out brochures. They had also met clambering up and down ladders stocktaking for IKEA, a work detail Islam Net had organized to raise funds. They had hit it off.
Hisham had arrived in Norway in 2003, three years after Ayan. While she had been flown in as part of a UN family reunification program, Hisham had traveled alone from Eritrea. He gave his age as thirteen upon arrival, was registered as an underage asylum seeker, and was placed with a foster family in Bærum. He quickly made friends and spent his time playing football. They had never had a more harmonious foster child, the family said.
After a year in the reception class, and after completing lower secondary, he was accepted on the sports program at Dønski. He was a skillful football player, a talented athlete on the whole, in fact, and had the biggest, whitest smile in the class. In a school photograph from Dønski, he is lying across the girls’ laps, like a mascot.
What he had not told the authorities when he arrived was that his family was in Oslo. He had uncles and cousins living in the city. He led two lives. One in Bærum, one with his uncles.
He had changed since Ayan saw him at the IKEA fund-raiser. His beard was longer. His features were hard where before they had been soft. He wore the clothes of the Prophet. Something else had changed, she discovered: his civil status. Hisham had married.
* * *
It was time for the concluding lecture. The theme was the day of judgment.
“Dear brothers and sisters,” Muhammad Abdul Jabbar began. He was the leader of a large missionary organization in Birmingham.
The end is near! was the message. Earth would break up and be smashed to pieces, the oceans would burn, people would try to escape but there would be nowhere to hide. The stars would be extinguished and fall from the sky, darkness would descend as the universe reached its end. Everyone would perish prior to resurrection to face God’s judgment.
Ayan had set up a profile on YouTube where she posted links to websites and religious channels. Jabbar’s speech, “The Soul of a Believer,” had the same message as the one he conveyed at the Peace Conference: “These are dark times, there is no denying. The end is near!”
The special effects showing the apocalypse were Hollywood inspired. There were thunder, lightning, flames, people burning, screaming, and falling before the deep voice of the preacher resounded: “Is this the end? No, it’s just the beginning…” The angel of death will appear, flames coming from his eyes, his nostrils, his mouth, to take the sinners with him. Behind him an abundance of angels will stand with glowing faces and bouquets of flowers in their hands to welcome the chosen ones.
Those who had obeyed Allah and lived a life subject to his rules would be raised up. Because God had said, “They who believe and do righteous deeds—those are the companions of paradise.”
The others would be destroyed: “The drug dealers. Pimps. The wine dealers. Junkies. Crackheads.” All of them would go down, but others as well. The men who fooled women, who made women do things they did not want to do. Those who did not pray, who did not fast. The adulterers. The ones who stole, lied, and killed! No one would escape judgment. Unbelievers would die as unbelievers. An agonizing punishment awaited them, and they would have no one to help them. Because God had said, “If anyone seeks a religion other than Islam, it will never be accepted, and in the next world he will be among the losers.”
The omens for the approaching day
